and so my grandfather, too,who, having left Topekafor Los Angeles’s early sprawl,exits the train station’s dim

into day’s white flash,takes one step onto his upturnedapple crate, a new Biblein his palm, and he begins

to explain why all things are fire,what it is that makes you acheawake, and why this mustbe so. Once, on a gritty

city beach in California—flies,stinking strands of kelprotting, Styrofoam—heand I sat watching a gull choir

first eyeball, then swoop,then peck, almost in unison,something tangled in a blue tarpwashed-in above the tide-pull.

A drowning victim, maybe.A vagrant. And though unableto see what was there, when heput his hand in mine

I could not have even countedall the things I wishedto believe in, and which would stillbe true if what I remembered

was the sound of the waves landing,but now there is only the lunglesshot breath of L.A.on my cheek, the cries of gulls,

their wings ruffling into flight.The night after his memorial,someone dug a hole intoKansas silt loam, dropped

into it the plastic baggiewith his ashen remains.Nothing then but distance in everydirection. Above us, a satellite’s

beacon begged the horizonfor home, the heavens’ scalesmeasured the darkness, and that’s all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joshua Robbins is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Tennessee where he teaches poetry and fiction writing, and serves as Editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers. His awards include the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, as well as multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appears in Best New Poets,Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere.